There have been plenty of movies made about Chicago, in Chicago, and around Chicago; but there is no other feature film that captures the best visual and cultural essence of Chicago in 1980 than the Blues Brothers. I was reminded of this the other night as my 15-year-old son and I watched it for the fifth or sixth time. The unimpeded view of iconic tall buildings across the cityscape made the best modern high-rises of Chicago easily recognizable (along with one in Milwaukee as seen from the bridge to nowhere in the famous car chase scene).
Thirty years ago Chez Paul was considered the finest restaurant in Chicago, crime was up, Jane Byrne was mayor, and graft was a daily part of doing business with practically every city or county department. When John Landis, the director of the Blues Brothers looked for permission to shoot (the film) on Cook County property, he didn’t approach the County Board directly, instead he asked the mob to ask the County Board for permission. Like other American cities of similar size, Chicago had yet to see the urban renaissance of young professionals forsaking the suburbs in droves for the urban experience; gentrifying neighborhoods that needed it as well as those that didn’t.
By the time John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters, Junior Wells, and Howlin’ Wolf had all passed, so too had Nate’s Deli, which had been used as the Soul Café (in the movie) where Aretha Franklin belted out Think, and John Lee Hooker was performing Boom, Boom outside on Maxwell Street. In the following scene, Ray Charles performed Shake a Tail Feather at Ray’s Music Exchange, or better known to Bronzeville residents as Shelley’s Loan and Jewelry on E. 47th Street. James Brown performed in the Pilgrim Baptist Church on East 91st and the concert scene at the Palace Hotel Ballroom with Cab Calloway in Wisconsin was actually at the South Shore Country Club in Chicago.
Today, Maxwell Street is still there in name, but almost all the buildings have either been demolished or rebuilt. Where there was once was a street market, blues clubs, and authentic soul food, the area is now full of chain restaurants, sports bars and new condo and townhouse developments. The infrastructure of bridges, roads and the L train that was so predominately represented in the movie, have been modernized by new train cars (I miss the look of the old ones) and some very ugly new station stops, but the underlying infrastructure of concrete, steel and pavement is in no less decay than the wood piles of Venice.
The Chicago skyline has dramatically changed as well. The city has increased the amount of tall buildings over 18 stories by almost 10 fold in the last 30 years, and it hasn’t made it a more attractive skyline, just a bigger one. One has to remember that the first skyscraper in Chicago (and thus the world) was only 10 stories in height. Most buildings in cities, including Chicago, were only a few stories high, and the vast majority of them, no matter when they were built, could not be considered good architecture – more like building infill. The difference is that this new litany of tall buildings is what we see on the skyline from all vantage points, and the vast majority of the new buildings help to clutter the skyline, rather than improve it.
It’s not all bad. As the city changed, so too did politics, business investment, real estate, investment in education – and the perception of ourselves as an urban society. There have been wonderful improvements made to the built environment in Chicago in the last 30 years: countless preservation projects, Millennium Park, the Gary Comer Center, Little Village Academy, Buckingham Fountain Pavilions, the tree planting of the boulevards and Lake Shore Drive, the Midas House, to name just a small few of the more thoughtful, meaningful projects – real architecture in Chicago. Too bad the same architects weren’t designing more of the new tall buildings that now litter the city’s skyline.
The plot of the Blues Brothers was to raise money to save from foreclosure the Catholic orphanage in which they grew up. The irony of the plot is that it was Cook County foreclosing on the Catholic Church – and as an organized religion, the Catholic Church does not pay taxes. In today’s election, once again we are being told how horrible our tax situation is, and that we need to rely more on private enterprise and expertise to save us from the horrible mistakes of government. The reality is we are paying less taxes as a percentage of income than we were 30 years ago, and those who make more the $250,000 a year, are paying substantially less. But, what is government supposed to do for us? Should our expectation of the government not be to give us a physical infrastructure to which we base the way we live in good times or bad – like the government gave the automobile manufacturers paved highways – or the western sates power and water? Unfortunately, the projects of this great recession do not match those of the great depression in either scope or quality, and in the private sector, unlike, say, Rockefeller Center in New York, the big building projects have done little for Chicago’s skyline, culture, or sense of identity.
